A Plan Tailored to Fit Your Needs

We can tailor an individual insurance and benefits package that takes into account all your unique circumstances in such areas as personal life insurance, disability income insurance, long term care insurance, retirement and longevity planning strategies, as well as business financial strategies such as deferred compensation or executive benefits.

Life Insurance

Life insurance should serve as the foundation of your family’s financial security, helping to ensure that your loved ones will be alright financially even if something were to happen to you.

Christ Taylor LLP offers a full suite of high-quality, competitively priced life insurance products, including permanent, term, combination and variable policies. Since life insurance policies are designed with different needs in mind, we take the time to properly assess “how much” and “what kind”.

Whether you are looking for temporary protection, estate planning, cash accumulation or the ability to purchase a variable life insurance policy, we have the solutions.

The Value of a Life Insurance Audit

Your Life Insurance policy is one of the most valuable assets you own. When you purchased it, you probably made certain assumptions about future needs, interest rates, planned premiums and other considerations. While the original reason may still exist, your needs may have changed and requiring more or less coverage….life constantly changes (new family situation, different career, shift in financial status, change in health, etc).

A comprehensive evaluation of your life insurance coverage confirms whether the choices you made years ago still make sense, and most importantly, if the policy you own is the most efficient policy available today.

Once all information is received, we will review the findings with you. If changes are needed, suggestions to adjust your current policy or alternatives to help you reach your goals will be made. Medical history will be reviewed to ensure your policy changes are being properly managed.

Disability Income Insurance

Your ability to earn a living is far and away your largest asset. What would happen if you become unable to work in the event of sudden injury or illness? A long term disability could suspend or terminate your income for an extended period of time. It could force you to close your business.

Disability income insurance is a solution to protect your most valuable asset – your ability to earn an income. Christ Taylor LLP offers high-quality disability insurance products covering total or partial disability of professionals, business executives, small business owners and others.

Long-Term Care

If you develop a chronic illness or become disabled and can no longer care for yourself for an extended period of time, you’ll need long-term care services.

And they aren’t cheap. The median cost for a home-health aide for an eight-hour day is more than $44,000 a year, while nursing care in a facility with a private room has a median cost of almost $84,000 a year.1 As life expectancies increase, so does the duration of long-term care needs, and the financial burden may end up falling on your loved ones after you’ve run through your own life savings.

Long-term care insurance pays for a wide range of services and procedures that typically aren’t covered by medical insurance that would otherwise be paid out-of-pocket. Some policies cover nursing home care, while others include coverage for an entire range of services such as care in an adult day care center, assisted living, medical equipment, and home care. The types of care fall into three categories: skilled, intermediate and custodial.

Do I Need Long-Term Care Insurance?

Given that the cost of long-term care can quickly deplete your life’s savings, you should seriously consider adding long-term care insurance to your financial plan. Plus, there’s about a 70% chance you’ll need some type of long-term care after age 65. Similar to home, health and auto insurance, long-term care insurance is available to help protect you, your family and your assets.

Estate Planning

Believe it or not, you have an estate. In fact, nearly everyone does. Your estate is comprised of everything you own— your car, home, other real estate, checking and savings accounts, investments, life insurance, furniture, personal possessions. No matter how large or how modest, everyone has an estate and something in common—you can’t take it with you when you die.

When that happens—and it is a “when” and not an “if”—you probably want to control how those things are given to the people or organizations you care most about. To ensure your wishes are carried out, you need to provide instructions stating whom you want to receive something of yours, what you want them to receive, and when they are to receive it. You will, of course, want this to happen with the least amount paid in taxes, legal fees, and court costs.

That is estate planning—making a plan in advance and naming whom you want to receive the things you own after you die. However, good estate planning is much more than that.

Estate planning is for everyone.

It is not just for “retired” people, although people do tend to think about it more as they get older. Unfortunately, we can’t successfully predict how long we will live, and illness and accidents happen to people of all ages.

Estate planning is not just for “the wealthy,” either, although people who have built some wealth do often think more about how to preserve it. Good estate planning often means more to families with modest assets, because they can afford to lose the least.

Too many people don’t plan.

Individuals put off estate planning because they think they don’t own enough, they’re not old enough, they’re busy, think they have plenty of time, they’re confused and don’t know who can help them, or they just don’t want to think it. Then, when something happens to them, their families have to pick up the pieces.

Annuities Can Provide An Income Stream

As life expectancy continues to increase for most Americans, it’s clear that many people will spend more of their time – and their savings – in retirement. An annuity can play an important role in your retirement income strategy by providing a guaranteed, predictable income stream you can’t outlive – and may offer tax-deferral advantages as well. However, annuities are not right for everyone. It’s important to consider fees or expenses when determining whether an annuity will be a good fit for your financial plan.

Individual Medical Insurance

Christ Taylor LLP also specializes in individual/family health insurance coverage.To shop for individual and family plans or to see if you qualify for a government funded health insurance subsidy, please click the following link.

Taking Care of Business: Smart Strategies to Help You Protect Your Business

Owning your own business can be one of the most satisfying experiences of your life. But owning a business also entails a lot of responsibilities – to your business, your employees, and your family.

To get a sense of how well you’ve planned for these responsibilities, ask yourself the following questions to the right. While you’ve probably thought about these questions before, you may not have adequately addressed all of them. There are several strategies to help give you a better understanding of how proper insurance and benefits planning can help protect your business and family, improve recruitment and retention, and provide you with new ways to reward employees.

Ask Yourself the Following Questions:

What will happen to my business if I die?

What will happen to my business if I become disabled?

What will happen to my business when I retire?

Critical illness/dread disease such as heart attack, stroke, and cancer

What will happen if certain key employees die or become permanently disabled?

How can I attract and retain the best employees?

What can I do to help ensure that my most vital employees remain loyal to the business?

How can I help ensure that my business will be able to weather unforeseen financial hardships?

Business Continuation

One of the first things any business owner needs to consider is how to protect against events that may threaten the future of the business, like the death or disability of a proprietor, partner or key employee. When adversity strikes, a smart business continuation plan can help protect business partners and family members alike.

Keep your business alive with a Buy-Sell Agreement which is an agreement between owners to buy out a co-owner’s share of the business in the event of that co-owner’s retirement, disability or death. Buy-Sell agreements are typically funded with life insurance policies, allowing remaining business owners to buy the company interests of a co-owner’s share, if he/she were to die, at a previously agreed upon price. The amount is usually specified in a contract, which is created with the help of an attorney. This ensures that your business partners won’t have to scramble to come up with the money to buy out your share of the business and that your surviving family members will be fairly and promptly compensated for their share.

Business owners should also insure against the risk of becoming disabled and unable to work. In this case, disability buy-out insurance would fund the buy-sell agreement, allowing the disabled owner to be bought out, typically after a one year waiting period.

There is also business overhead insurance, which reimburses a business for overhead expenses in the event a business owner becomes totally disabled. A policy typically pays benefits for one to two years and helps cover expenses like salaries, taxes, employee benefits, rent, mortgage, utilities, equipment, malpractice premiums, etc.

Insure Against the Loss of Key Employees

In a business, there are often certain employees who have a critical impact on the bottom line. Key person insurance is life or disability income insurance purchased by the business on such an employee and payable to the business. The death or disability benefit can help make up for lost sales or earnings, or cover the cost of finding and training a replacement.

Protect Your Family’s Future

Myriad factors make it important for you to consider purchasing individual life insurance that can provide your family members with additional money to pay off debts, cover ongoing living expenses and fund future needs such as college and retirement after you die. Since you own this life insurance personally and it is not linked to the business, it can provide immediate financial support for your family. Also, an individually owned policy is typically creditor proof, meaning that the proceeds will flow directly to your family members and not to business creditors seeking to collect money they claim to be owed. One of the biggest mistakes people make is not having enough life insurance coverage. Having extra coverage on your own can help safeguard your family’s financial security.

Executive Benefits

Executive benefits help you offer your best employees a higher level of benefits and compensation along with significant tax advantages. They also compensate for the fact that most 401(k) programs restrict the ability of executives to accumulate enough money on a tax-favored basis to fund the retirement lifestyle they desire. Here are a few types of executive benefits that can help separate your company from the competition.

Deferred Compensation Plans (including SERPs)

This is a selective employee benefit that allows business owners to help key employees defer income and the taxes due on that income until a later date, usually retirement. The plan can also be used to provide executives with additional life and disability benefits in addition to the basic coverage that all employees receive.

One option is a supplemental executive retirement plan (SERP). A SERP is a non-qualified deferred compensation agreement between a company and select key employees in which the business agrees to provide a specified benefit amount at retirement, or should the employee die, become disabled or terminate employment. When paid, the benefit becomes taxable as income for the executive and tax deductible for the company. Often life and disability insurance policies are used to help fund the payments.

Executive Bonus Plans (Section 162 Plans)

Under this type of plan, the employee purchases a permanent life insurance policy on his or her life. The company pays the executive a bonus equal to the premium, which is usually considered taxable income to the employee and tax-deductible to the employer. The employee controls the policy, including the death benefit and the cash value, which accumulates tax-free until it is withdrawn.

Supplemental Disability Insurance

Most group long term disability policies provide roughly 60 percent of an employee’s income, up to a stated maximum. For most employees, two-thirds of their income won’t exceed the employer’s maximum benefit. But for highly compensation executives, the maximum benefit may amount to less than 50 percent of their take home pay in the event of a disability. To address this problem, employers often purchase additional individual disability policies on these executives to bring their total benefit, on a percentage basis, up to the same level as all other employees.

Split Dollar Plans

This is a method for an employer and a select key employee to split the cost of a permanent life insurance policy. Premiums, death benefits and sometimes cash values are split between the two, according to the needs and objectives of each. These arrangements help reduce out-of-pocket costs for both the employer and the employee. Split-dollar premiums are not tax deductible by the employer. Death-benefit proceeds received by a named beneficiary are generally income tax-free.